Microsoft is carrying out a massive social experiment in China — and almost no one knows about it

Microsoft is carrying out a massive social experiment in China — and almost no one knows about it

Ex Machine the Movie Microsoft is conducting what one senior researcher and scientist at the company says “could be the largest Turing test in history” in China. In a report for Nautilus, the researcher, Yongdong Wang, outlined what the company was doing with Xiaoice — pronounced “Shao-ice” and translated as “little Bing” — in China. The Turing test, created by British scientist Alan Turing, is a test that looks to see if a human can detect whether the entity answering a question is a human or a computer. The test has become a fixture in pop culture, with a starring role in the film “Ex Machina.” According to Wang, Xiaoice is used by millions of people every day and can respond with human-like answers, questions, and “thoughts.” If a user…